


Keep My Body From the Fire

by roboticonography



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Beard Burn, Bearded Steve Rogers, Confident Steve Rogers, F/M, Kitchen Sex, Oral Sex, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-14
Updated: 2019-11-14
Packaged: 2021-02-01 06:47:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21424444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roboticonography/pseuds/roboticonography
Summary: Steve is back in Peggy's life: older, experienced, confident. Peggy still has a few questions she's waiting to hear the answers to.
Relationships: Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers
Comments: 69
Kudos: 462





	Keep My Body From the Fire

**Author's Note:**

> Some of you wanted Steve with a beard, some of you wanted Steve being older and more confident, and most of you just wanted Steve being a sexy beast. I have endeavoured to please on all fronts.
> 
> For those who care about such things, there are references to both Peggy and Steve having had previous, unnamed lovers, but no specifics.
> 
> Title from “No Plan” by Hozier, which is either about accepting the end of days, or about taking your sweet-ass time doing the deed, or both.
> 
> P.S. Happy birthday to a special friend.

Peggy doesn’t care for the beard at first. But she has to admit, once it’s grown in, that it suits him.

It might not have suited the old Steve—which is to say, the young Steve—but this new Steve wears it well, along with a concerned furrow in his brow, and the faintest laughter lines at the corners of his eyes.

She doesn’t know how to explain to him that a disguise isn’t necessary. That no one left now would ever mistake this man for the boy who once donned Cap’s cowl.

She knows the bare facts of his life apart from her: his work with the Avengers, his time as a wanted man, the cataclysm that nearly wrecked him, the last-ditch plan that saved everything. She also knows that facts are only one small part of a story. It’s the story she’s still waiting for.

His age is a novelty. He’s either a hundred and seven, or thirty-eight, depending on the time of day and his mood. By all accounts, he’s lived more years than she during their time apart, and it shows.

He talks less than he once did, but with greater confidence, every word weighed and measured before it is spoken. On the rare occasions that she starts an argument, he digs in gamely; left to his own devices, he prefers to withdraw rather than engage when they disagree.

He’s a considerate housemate: he makes coffee, does the washing-up, and folds laundry, all without being asked. Sometimes he cooks. And when she has to prompt him to pick up his stray socks, or return her books to their rightful place on the shelf, he doesn’t equivocate, or pretend it’s new information. He’s clearly accustomed to the daily intimacies and inconveniences of cohabitation.

His form is still that of a being akin to the gods—sculpted from flawless marble, animated by lightning—but his face is no longer the open book it once was. Not that Peggy is opposed to tackling a page-turner.

His cheekbones are sharp, his hips narrow, as though he’s spent the last few years on rations. His way of moving, too, is leaner: silent, efficient, economical. Lethal.

But his hair still stands up at the back in the mornings, just as it used to. The seawater blue of his eyes is as changeable as ever. And his skin is exactly as soft as she always imagined it would be.

Their first few encounters were like being in the eye of a storm. Now that the emotional weather is a bit calmer, Steve seems to have realized that he can afford to take his time with her. And he does. _Hours_ of it. Many of them spent on his knees, in the most pleasant sort of worship.

Which is how she discovers that the beard has a distinct disadvantage, compared to, say, a pair of glasses.

She had no way of knowing, because she’s never been loved by a man with a full beard before. And she’s never been loved so often or so thoroughly by _any_ man, before now. 

Certainly a couple of them had been game enough to try it, once or twice—but even the most enthusiastic high-divers were never able to produce any results from her, and eventually got fed up with trying. She’d always assumed, until now, that it simply wasn’t her cup of tea.

She’s never been so thrilled to be mistaken.

As is so often the case, it turned out that it was all about the right skill set for the job. Or perhaps, she thinks, smiling indulgently to herself at the breakfast table, the right partner.

“What’s that smile for?” he asks.

“Last night. And this morning.”

The old Steve would have blushed. Her Steve grins at her, and takes an overly enthusiastic bite of his buttered toast. “Someone must’ve treated you right,” he observes. “You’re all pink.”

“_Someone_ has a high opinion of himself,” she retorts. “It’s not a blush. You’ve scraped me raw from my neck to my knees.”

“Let me see.” He’s already reaching for the sash of her robe, right there at the kitchen table.

She bats his hand away, and puts on her best American drawl: “Nothing doing, mister.”

He shrugs, unrepentant. “Show me your neck, then. Or your knees.”

She loosens her dressing-gown, sliding it off her shoulder to expose the damage. 

He drags his chair closer to hers, and dutifully examines the angry red stippling across her throat and along her collarbone.

Demurely, she asks, “Have you had this problem with any of your other lady-friends?”

His eyes flick up to hers. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.” He touches the side of her neck lightly.

She _does_ want the answers, very badly—but not just now. “I thought you might have a remedy to suggest.” She’s short of breath, for no good reason at all.

“I’ll be more gentle.” He demonstrates by pressing a soft kiss to one of the sensitive spots. 

She closes her eyes, breathing him in: spicy aftershave, sun-warmed skin. She wants him again, a peak-of-the-roller-coaster thrill coursing through her at the thought of it. Coyly, she informs him, “The worst of it is on my thighs, actually.”

He smiles against the juncture of her neck and shoulder. “Let me take a look.” The words are so soft that she feels them rather than hears them. His hand slips between the layers of her dressing-gown, fingers cool against her heated skin.

“Steve,” she says helplessly.

He pulls back to look her in the eye, and she knows that he will wait for a clear signal from her before he carries on. She’s found that he has a dislike for games of power imbalance—for any sort of no-means-yes language, even in jest. She wonders, not for the first time, about the nature of his first lessons in love, and the person who taught them.

When he speaks again, it’s in a tone she recognizes from strategy meetings. “The way I see it, you have two options. One, I could shave.”

“Don’t,” she tells him, with a certainty that surprises her. 

“Two, I could stop going down on you so much.”

The directness with which he names the deed makes her blush, after all.

“Don’t,” she repeats, softer.

His smile is wry. “Then we’re at an impasse.”

Coyly, she suggests, “I might need to build up a tolerance.”

He nods. Even beneath the beard, there’s a certain set to his jaw that she remembers, and adores.

He stands and collects their half-finished plates, her tea, his coffee, clearing it all away to the counter in seconds, before returning to lift her onto the little kitchen table.

“Steve,” she protests, half-heartedly. “We have a bed.”

“But this is where we eat,” he counters, and winks at her. “And it’s the most important meal of the day.”

Once upon a time, she might have found this kind of talk startling, coming from the young man who thought _fondue_ referred to some obscure foreign sex act. Now, though, she just laughs, and smooths a hand over his bare chest.

As she does so, she makes a mental note to take him shopping later in the week: the only pajamas she’d had to offer him were an old pair of striped cotton pants, left behind by a former suitor. On Steve, they’re clam-diggers. And apparently, at some point in the future, men leave off wearing undershirts entirely.

Peggy doesn’t particularly mind the show, but he has a habit of going out to fetch the newspaper in the mornings. She’s trying to avoid making her neighbours even _more_ curious about the husband she’s somehow neglected to mention until now.

“And I like the light in here,” he continues, undoing her robe with delicate fingers. “Maybe I should draw you instead.”

It’s the first time he’s spoken of taking up his old hobby, and her breath catches unexpectedly. “Maybe you should.”

“Maybe after.”

She shrugs off the dressing-gown. Her plain white drawers and camisole aren’t especially alluring, but Steve never seems to mind. He undresses her the rest of the way, with an unhurried confidence that she still finds very exciting. 

He kneels on the floor, lifting her leg to hook it over his shoulder. Sunlight gilds his swept-back hair; she gives in to temptation, and rakes her fingers through it.

He makes good on his promise to be gentle, his palm covering her inner thigh to shield it from further abrasion as he takes his first taste of her.

A lifetime ago, Peggy watched a group of new recruits take apart, clean, and reassemble firearms. Private Rogers was never the fastest, but he was, far and away, the most methodical. And that’s still the case. He may be larger and stronger, more taciturn, less bashful, but that determined part of him—that urge to both _do the right thing_ and _do the thing right_—that still exists.

He makes a soft, greedy sound, and delves deeper, pulling her flush against him. She gasps, fingers tightening around a handful of his hair. With her head tilted back, the morning sun is in her eyes; everything slows to a crawl, as though she’s floating underwater.

But the longer it goes on, the more she realizes that gentle and methodical isn’t what she craves just now. She wants that roller-coaster drop—the jolt forward, the freefall.

“Steve.”

No reply.

She opts for a more direct approach, tugging on his hair until he leans back to look up at her. “Come up here.”

He smiles. “I’ll get there.”

“Now.” She starts to tremble, filled with a dreadful need beyond anything she can articulate. “_Please_.”

Something in her face or her voice convinces him to stand up. 

She grabs him by the waist, yanks down his ridiculous pajama pants, and urges him close, closer, until he’s sliding inside.

There’s nothing soft or measured in it; they crash together, inexorable as the tide. A sweet, wild joy that would be too much to bear, if it weren’t tempered by a feeling of incalculable loss. 

She wishes she could shelter him, just like this, always. 

She wishes, impossibly, to protect him from things that have already happened, in a future that may never come to pass.

“Darling—” The endearment is jolted out of her, sudden and desperate, as though it could be the last time.

His breathing is harsh, irregular. He presses his face against her neck and comes, his shoulders shaking with it.

Release washes over her, and she lets out a sob, hard and heartfelt.

Steve lifts her up. He doesn’t fuss, doesn’t ask her why she’s crying—just carries her to the bedroom and lays her down.

She swipes at her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry.” Though what she’s sorry for, exactly, she couldn’t say. 

He settles—one arm across her chest, his broad body fitted to hers like a shield strapped to her back. “It’s okay.”

“Is it? How do you know?” To hide her embarrassment, she takes refuge in teasing. “Are you in the habit of making all your conquests cry?”

“Conquests?” She can hear his amused look. “I think you’ve got me confused with Howard Stark.”

“Paramours, then.”

He presses a kiss to her temple. “Stop.”

“I want to know about them. I want to know about all of it.”

“I’ll tell you about all of it. I’m not starting with an annotated list of who I slept with.”

“So there _are_ enough of them to make a list.”

He sighs, but doesn’t contradict her.

“Did you feel out of place there? Were you lonely?”

“Parts of it were tough, but… I had people I cared about. Work I liked doing. Got to try a lot of new things, go different places. It was a good life.”

“Could you have been happy, if you’d stayed?”

He’s quiet.

“Steve?”

“Do you think I ran away?”

“If you had, I wouldn’t think any less of you.”

“Well, I didn’t.”

“You can be… difficult to read.” Admitting it feels like a professional failing as much as a personal one. “If you don’t tell me, all I can do is make my best guess.”

He presses his closed mouth to her shoulder, for what feels like a long time. She isn’t sure what else to say or do.

When he finally speaks again, his voice is soft. “My whole life has been about what I could do for others. I looked after my mom until she died. Then the war starts, so I enlist. The serum works, I put on a monkey suit. Plane full of bombs, I go into the ice. And when I wake up, now there’s aliens to fight. Then it’s HYDRA. Then it’s killer robots. Then it’s my friends. One damn thing after another. Any time I start to feel like I can breathe a little, it goes to hell all over again. And then... Thanos comes along, and I’m just—I’m done.”

She laces her fingers through his.

“Except I couldn’t let myself _be_ done. I kept thinking that I owed it to the people I let down to keep going. To make the world better for the ones who—”

“You didn’t let anyone down,” she interjects.

“Peggy.”

“You didn’t!”

“That’s not what I’m—” He makes a frustrated noise. “Saying that to me now is not going to affect my decisions in the past. Future. Whatever.”

“All right. Go on.”

“What I’m trying to say is, I reached a point where I accepted that that was my role in the world. To keep giving myself away until there was nothing left.”

It’s an incredibly sad statement. And he makes it so matter-of-factly that she feels like she might cry all over again.

“But this—coming back to you, starting over together—it was something I did because _I_ wanted it.”

“Oh,” she breathes, stunned.

It’s so simple, and yet she’s avoided seeing it until now: the choice that brought him here was not the last weary march of a soldier ready to lay down arms. It was, instead, a leap of faith—an act of such breathless, boundless optimism that it could only have been Steve, _her_ Steve.

“Okay. I know how that sounds.” He’s clearly mistaken her reaction for anger or hurt; his entire body is tense. “I never thought of you as—I mean, it wasn’t some kind of—” His voice lifts as he struggles to push the words out. “How you feel about it matters to me. If you didn’t want me here, I wouldn’t be here.”

She turns in his arms. He has a look she hasn't seen in a very long time: wide-eyed, skittish.

“I’m _thrilled_ you’re here,” she assures him, punctuating it with a kiss on the tip of his nose.

“Do you ever miss him?” 

“Who?”

“The me from before. The guy you fell in love with.”

The question takes her by surprise. There are a hundred platitudes she could fall back on; the truth is both deeper and simpler than any of them.

Peggy Carter is no time traveller—but she can see Steve, with perfect clarity, as he was, is, and will be. 

And she loves every version of him.

“You _are_ the man I fell in love with.” She lays a hand against his cheek, the coarse hair prickling her palm. “And I don’t plan to miss you ever again.”

He smiles. She knows that smile. 

“Does that mean I get to finish my breakfast?”

“If you like,” she replies, with feigned carelessness.

He turns his head to kiss her wrist. “I do like.” The proof of which is currently pressed against her hip.

She glances down pointedly. “Do you think about _anything_ other than sex?”

He pretends to consider the question at face value. “Baseball,” he says at last.

“Doesn’t it bore you? You must know how it all comes out.”

“You make it sound like I woke up, sat down, and looked up seventy years of box scores.” He nuzzles into the crook of her neck and shoulder, forgetting to be careful of her tender skin.

“Hmm,” she says appreciatively. “Didn’t you?”

“No. I was too busy romancing every woman within a fifty-mile radius, remember?”

By way of reply, she bites his ear.

“But you’re the only one who can keep up with me.” He gathers her up, shifting her onto her back. “So here I am.”

“And here you’ll stay, my darling,” she murmurs, holding him close. “Right where you belong.”


End file.
